The present invention relates to electronic documents.
Electronic documents can be displayed on many different types of electronic devices. Electronic documents can be stored for display in many formats, and can be stored and/or displayed at different levels of resolution. The techniques used to display level of resolution can depend on the available storage and/or the processing power. For example, a technique for displaying rich text documents that combine text and graphics is to render them using vector graphics. Rendering using vector graphics includes non-trivial computing, which may not be efficient on low power devices. Another technique is to convert the document into a raster image. A raster image includes a collection of individual pixels, one pixel for each point on a computer screen. Raster images can have storage requirements that are too high for limited storage devices.
Handheld devices are one category of electronic devices that can be used to store and display electronic documents. Typical handheld devices are constrained in both the amount of memory available and processing power—for example, some handhelds have as little as 2 megabytes of internal memory and processor speeds as low as 16 megahertz. Documents can be loaded on to handheld devices from computers or other devices. For example, a document can be loaded on to a handheld device through a desktop application of a computer. The desktop application configures a document, if necessary, for viewing and storage in a handheld device. The configured document is transmitted to the handheld device through a synchronization interface for the handheld, such as a HotSync™ interface distributed by Palm, Inc. of Milpitas, Calif. Then, the transferred document can be viewed in the handheld.